How to Make Your Own Online Videos

When it comes to making videos to promote your business—to engage your audience, to showcase your products—professional quality usually demands professional prices.

But sometimes you don’t need Hollywood production values in your videos. Sometimes you just need good videos that you can turn around fast and for free (or at least fairly cheap).

If you haven’t thought about incorporating video into your marketing strategy, you should consider it—video is an incredibly versatile format after all:

Videos can live in several places: The same video can potentially be used on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, embedded on your website/blog, etc.

Videos make for eye-catching social media posts/ads: Audiences can read, watch, and listen, so video can engage them in a different way than static imagery. Plus, videos play automatically on some channels like Facebook.

Videos can be repurposed into new videos and from other content formats: Video content can be clipped down, expanded upon, or converted into new videos or GIFs. You can also take infographics, blog posts, photos, and other types of content, and turn them into videos.

Not only that, but video’s share of total bandwidth is predicated to grow to encompass more than 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2020, making it the content format of the future.

The best part is that just because you don’t have the budget, doesn’t mean you can’t reap the benefits of video content.

How to Make Videos Without Hiring a Professional

While it definitely helps, you don’t necessarily need expensive equipment or even your own original footage to produce videos.

All you need is a concept in mind and an idea of what you want to use the video for.

From there, it’s a matter of:

Creating a rough storyboard of how you plan for it to flow and writing a script if you need one.

Finding or creating the footage or audio you need.

Editing it together in one of the many apps in this post, depending on your needs.

Packaging it up and uploading it as a social media post, ad, YouTube video, etc.

Where to Look For Free Stock Footage and Music

When you think about it, you don’t really need a camera to make your own videos.

You can repurpose existing photography, get what you need from stock footage sites, and even shoot your own footage with your phone if you really need to.

There’s a lot of places you can look for great free stock footage, fitting music and cool sound effects.

Depending on how the content is licensed, however, you might need to credit the creator of the footage you borrow or pay to use it for commercial purposes. For details on how and when to do this, check out the Creative Commons best practices for attribution and be sure to take a closer look at the conditions for use on each of the following sites.

Paid Stock Music and Footage

While you do have to pay, Audio Jungle and Video Hive are popular places to find sounds, music, video effects and stock footage to use and sample. They also offer free music, video templates, and more every month if you subscribe.

Free Tools to Help You Make Your Own Videos

While you can record video natively in most video hosting platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, there are plenty of apps for producing quick, good-looking videos for different occasions and in a short span of time.

I highly recommended giving the following tools a try, many of which are free and some of which come with their own library of stock imagery and other assets for you to use.

If you’d like to shoot and edit videos all on your phone, Power Director is an app that comes with a lot of the useful features.

The advantage of a mobile video editor like this is that you can record new footage and audio straight from your phone and directly import it into your work in your progress, making it easy to do things like voiceovers.

Tips for Making Engaging Videos

The assets and tools above make videos easier to create, but there’s a lot more to know about using these videos effectively in your marketing.

For one, videos that provoke an emotional reaction tend to perform better and have more viral potential, especially on Facebook. Since social videos are often watched with the sound off, captions also go a long way in increasing viewership.

Thumbnails also matter a lot as they are essentially the “headline” of your video that entices people to watch. Use Canva to easily create eye-catching thumbnails for your videos if you’re going to upload your videos to YouTube or another platform that pits you against other videos.

Finally, since it’s not just how you create the videos but how you upload them too, you should be wary of the specifications for each channel, which I’ve linked to below:

Do It Yourself Video

Whether you’re making videos or another type of content, quality is inevitably how you compete. But it doesn’t necessarily have to cost you a lot.

Entrepreneurs and creators can always make up for what they lack in resources with resourcefulness.

So if you have a hunch that videos can take your marketing to the next level, don’t let the perceived costs and amount of effort stop you. You can get started for free using these resources and work your way up from there.

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